Lawsuit raises questions about brain harvesting operation

PORTLAND – A Gorham couple’s claim that their dead son’s entire brain was donated to a research laboratory in Maryland without their consent points to a lack of oversight of brain harvesting at the state Medical Examiner’s Office, according to the Maine Sunday Telegram.

The newspaper said its investigation found that 31 of 99 brains that were shipped from Maine to the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., from 1999 to 2003 lacked consent forms that would provide written proof that family members authorized the donations.

The brain harvesting was coordinated by Matthew Cyr, who was then the state’s funeral inspector. The Telegram said the Stanley Institute paid Cyr $1,000 to $2,000 for each brain he sent there, and that records show he collected more than $150,000 from the laboratory during the four-year period.

Cyr resigned his part-time post as funeral inspector last August. Four months earlier, he was named, along with the private research laboratory and its founder, as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by Frank and Lorraine Gagnon in Cumberland County Superior Court.

The Gagnons said they agreed to supply a 1-inch or 2-inch sample of the brain of their son, A.J. Gagnon, who died last year of a drug overdose. Lorraine Gagnon said she was stunned to learn that A.J.’s entire brain had been taken.

“This is a kid I brought into the world and loved and cherished, and in death they have no right to touch him,” Lorraine Gagnon said.

Officials with the Stanley Institute, renowned for its research into schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are fighting the lawsuit. The lab’s founder, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, concluded in a memo last year that Lorraine Gagnon consented to the brain removal, then changed her mind.

“This is the first such instance in the 560 brains we have collected to date but should be expected to occur occasionally, given the difficult circumstances of death for a family. We will therefore return the brain to the funeral home as Ms. Gagnon requests,” Torrey wrote.

In June 2003, a brain, identified by the Stanley Institute as A.J.’s, was sent to a Portland funeral home for cremation.

Maine’s connection with the Stanley Institute came about after Dr. Margaret Greenwald was hired as Maine’s deputy chief medical examiner in 1997. Greenwald, now chief medical examiner, had done work for Torrey’s brain bank while she was in San Diego, and he approached her in 1998 about supplying brains from Maine.

Greenwald declined the offer but suggested that Torrey work with Cyr, who went on to coordinate the brain harvesting work within the Medical Examiner’s Office in Augusta.

Cyr, who now works as a police officer in Bucksport, still has a contract with the Medical Examiner’s Office to answer its phones after business hours, when reports of fatal accidents, drug overdoses and suicides often come in.

Cyr did not respond to the Telegram’s requests for an interview and has not responded to the lawsuit.

Chuck Dow, spokesman at the Attorney General’s Office, said there is no evidence that any laws were broken during the period when Cyr supplied the research laboratory with brains.

But several bioethicists said lax oversight and record-keeping can invite problems.